Enhancement of Interfacial Charge Transfer of TiO/Graphene with Doped Ca for Improving Electrical Conductivity.

Imparting surface coatings with conductivity is an effective way to prevent fire and explosion caused by electrostatic discharge. TiO is a commonly used paint; however, intrinsic TiO has poor electrical conductivity. Herein, we develop a method to make TiO coating highly conductive by doping Ca into the TiO lattice based on the introduction of graphene. It is demonstrated that doping Ca increases the carrier density of TiO and its morphology changes from a sphere to a spindle shape, which increases the interfacial contact area between TiO and graphene. Therefore, resistivity can be greatly decreased due to the construction of fast charge transport pathways from TiO to graphene, resulting from an increase in the speed of interfacial charge transfer. In addition, the electronic properties of the samples are also studied through first-principles calculations before and after Ca doping. The result of the theoretical analysis is in agreement with that of experiments. Thus, the lowest resistivity of Ca-TiO/graphene can reach 0.004 Ω cm. Consequently, the feature of superior conductivity of the Ca-TiO/graphene composite endows it with practical application potential in the field of antistatic coating.